1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for a cache optimized data format. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for including normalized data in a data stream that is optimized to a processor's memory capability.
2. Description of the Related Art
The increase of computer system processing speeds has allowed today's computer systems to perform fairly accurate terrain rendering. In the computer gaming industry, for example, three dimensional terrain rendering is an essential element for providing a “visual reality” to computer games. In addition to the gaming industry, three-dimensional terrain rendering is utilized in other fields, such as flight simulation and environmental planning.
Software developers may use “ray casting” for terrain rendering, which produces realistic images. However, ray casting algorithms are inherently complex, and, therefore, require excessive processing time. As an alternative, software developers may use vertical ray coherence for terrain rendering. Vertical ray coherence is an algorithm that exploits the geometric fact that if a plane containing two rays is vertical to a plane of a height map, the two rays may be processed using the same small subset of data from a digital terrain model.
While performing vertical ray coherence, a computer system uses vertical half planes to identify vertical rays, such as height map vertical rays, and computes image values along the height map vertical ray. A challenge found, however, is that a processor is required to quickly generate image values for a large amount of data points along the height map vertical ray and, with the limited memory space and processing power of personal computers and portable gaming devices, image generation speed may be slow.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to optimize a data's format that is particular to a processor's execution environment in order to increase image generation performance.